The damage done by a bow has a wider range of effectiveness than a melee weapon does, so some hits may do only minimal damage.Try using a crossbow. They have a shorter range, but usually have only one level of damage, so a hit makes a greater impact.

i usually notice the opposite, my bow deals plenty more damage than melee weapons, but i've got a pretty low-level marksman so maybe that's why.---His knuckles are so hot like they have been in an oven for over 80 years.-Little kid explaining a pokemon he made up, Cinder.

The damage done by a bow has a wider range of effectiveness than a melee weapon does, so some hits may do only minimal damage.I doubt this is true. I believe that as long as you charge your strike fully, you *always* do max damage. This means a Daedric bow always does 50 damage if it hits. Well, possibly more depending on strength and ammunition.

Note the numbers are generally "1 to x" or "2 to x". I've had a Daedric bow do very little damage.The range of the numbers shouldn't matter. As long as you charge your attack fully, you *always* do max damage. A sword with a damage range of 1 to 80 will always do 80 damage and will never do 1 damage. This holds true with *all* the melee weapons and while I've never really tested it with ranged weapons, it would surprise me immensely if the devs made the combat system work differently with ranged weapons.

What may cause damage to vary is the ammunition damage. I don't know how exactly it's added, but I'm guessing it's randomly decided and then added to the base bow damage.

Of course, damage is then modified by the armor rating of the target and your strength. 100 strength means +50% damage. It should work like that for bows and crossbows too. 0 strength means -50% damage.

Keep this in mind if you're a 40 strength Bosmer using a Bonemold bow. Your strength means you'll do -10% damage, and that takes your 30 dmg Bonemold bow down to 27 max. Now imagine you're hitting Umbra. As I recall, he's wearing full Orcish and his skill with medium armor is 100. This should put his armor rating around 100.

Formula for AR damage reduction, according to UESP, is (damage^2) / (damage + AR). In this case, damage is 27 and AR is 100, so what we have is (27^2) / (27 + 100) = 729 / 127 = 5.74

In other words, if you're attacking Umbra with a 40 strength Bosmer using a 30 damage bow, you can expect to only do ~6 damage per hit. If you're using a Daedric bow instead, the base is 50, strength reduces it to 45, and then Umbra's AR will reduce it to 14.

Now, if you managed to get your strength to 150 instead, you'll be doing +100% damage and so your Daedric bow will hit for 100 damage, which an AR of 100 will cut in half, taking us back to 50.

As you can see, your marksman damage *will* suffer quite a lot against heavily armoured targets. The only good thing is that there aren't so many enemies in the game that actually wear tons of armour, and you can use those enchanted arrows from the official AoE Arrows mod against them.

Actually, there's one more good thing. Creatures don't have AR so you'll always do full damage against them. Karstaag (the Yeti from Bloodmoon), Mr Huntsman (you know who), Almy, The Imperfect One, the liches, they're all creatures. Arrows = murder against them.

Unfortunatley, the Imperial Dragon fellow, the top dawg Redoran bugger, Gaenor, the crazy archer chick in Mournhold, the various hands, and of course all the damn furries in Bloodmoon are all NPCs, and all but the furbals sport full suits of armor and know how to use them. Arrows = less that superbly effective.

100% chance projectile store mod is great help. Makes it so that you don't have to keep restocking on arrows, as all arrows that hit something can be looted once that creature is dead. Also make sure to make marksman a major as it doesnt level fast, and if you are using a chargen mod then add +15 to it as ranged damage is very important for kiting enemies that are too strong to engage in melee but slow enough to kite.

Also use the "bound longbow" spell for the best bow in the game. Normal bows don't matter with the enchantment, so the +10 marksman is great help early on. The bound lonbow spell can be used at 20 conjuration with about 60-70% success rate IIRC. At level one you can get a daedric longbow!---COD:WaW FC: 442557127173Pokemon SS FC: 1462-8589-4263